NAM is the official provider of online scientific reporting for the
8th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment
and Prevention (IAS 2015), which will take place in Vancouver, Canada,
19th-22nd July 2015.

What is HIV? news selected from other sources

Scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany and collaborators from Heidelberg University, in the joint Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit, have obtained the first structure of the immature form of HIV at a high enough resolution to pinpoint exactly where each building block sits in the virus. The study, published online today in Nature, reveals that the building blocks of the immature form of HIV are arranged in a surprising way.

For those of us who are normal, non-scientist people, an image of a virus doesn't necessarily hold any meaning. Artists were invited to create renderings of HIV – and the winning images are as educational as they are beautiful.

"While India has drastically reduced the spread of HIV over the past decade, new strains of the virus that cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) are troubling medical scientists in this country," Inter Press Service reports (Devraj, 11/29). According to SciDev.Net, "[S]cientists have found new strains of the HIV-1 subtype C -- which is responsible for half of the world's HIV infections -- are evolving rapidly in this country."

Mutations in HIV that develop during the first few weeks of infection may play a critical role in undermining a successful early immune response, a finding that reveals the importance of vaccines targeting regions of the virus that are less likely to mutate.

Nearly one quarter of
humans bitten or scratched while hunting nonhuman primates in Gabon had
evidence of simian foamy retrovirus (SFV), a virus closely related to
HIV. The finding underlines the continuing risk of cross-species
transmission of retroviruses.

In perhaps the most comprehensive survey of the inner workings of HIV, an international team of scientists led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco has mapped every apparent physical interaction the virus makes with components of the human cells it
infects—work that may reveal new ways to design future HIV/AIDS drugs.

With the taming of the predominant HIV-1 type, responsible for a majority of the 2.7 million infection cases in the country, experts say it is time to evaluate the incidence and seriousness of the HIV-2 infection.

A man in France who recently travelled to Togo has been diagnosed with a
rare type of HIV-infection - Group N. This is the first time this type
of HIV-infection has been detected outside Cameroon. The infection is
considerably more similar to the virus type discovered in chimpanzees
than to other human type viruses.

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